


Black Holes And Revelations

by Rubynye



Category: Star Trek XI
Genre: Dubious Consentacles, Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, One of My Favorites, Other, Tentacle Monsters, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 02:52:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>No wonder we converse so well</i>, comes the reply. <i>Mathematics is the universal language.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Holes And Revelations

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings &amp; Spoilers: **Extremely dubious consent.** If you would not read outright non-con I wouldn't recommend you read this either.  
> Beta Reader Gratitude Lavishment: [](http://petronelle.livejournal.com/profile)[**petronelle**](http://petronelle.livejournal.com/)

Title: Black Holes &amp; Revelations  
Fandom: Star Trek XI  
Rating: NC-17  
Disclaimer: The Mathematician and its world belong to me; Chekov, Sulu, and their universe do not.  
Title From: "Starlight" by Muse

 

When they are introduced, Pavel is relieved to be told he isn't expected to pronounce the Mathematician's name; it informs him that no humanoids could, not even Lieutenant Uhura, because their sound production methods are simply unsuitable, being respiratory-system voice boxes and simple percussive symbologies. _When necessary, I produce auditory communications using malleable fronds and a soft-sided resonance chamber_, the Mathematician explains directly into Pavel's mind through the long yellowish tentacle pressed to his temple, its rubbery-leathery terminal pad as wide as his palm.

_Besides, sound is so inefficient a medium for information transfer._ Its words echo in his head somewhat hollowly, its voice in his mind smooth and light, genderless and reasonably human except that he can't identify a language, only articulated concepts.

Pavel nods carefully, pressing his hand over the tentacle-tip to ensure it stays attached, and the Mathematician sends him a wordless pulse that feels like a humanoid smile. "If I think, can you hear that?" he asks.

He is told _yes_ and _move nearer, your thoughts are faint through just one_, so he takes three steps towards the tangle of warm-colored tentacles heaped on the nearby dish-shaped platform, all in all looking something like a giant opaque jellyfish two meters across. It smells reminiscent of a jellyfish as well, faintly briny and strangely proteinaceous, alien but not unpleasant.

_I appear odd to you,_ says the Mathematician, its voice echoing with amusement as Pavel frantically shakes his head. The tentacle-tip peels away a little, and the sensation is sticky and uncomfortable, the Mathematician's tentacles rippling as its mental voice gets fainter.

He steps closer, and another tentacle, thicker and purplish, presses delicately as fingertips to his cheek; only after the Mathematician tells him _no apology is necessary_ does he realize that he thought, rather than said, "I'm sorry." _Telepathy is most useful,_ he thinks, and smiles at the pulse of wordless approval. _And you do not appear odd, just..._

Pavel remembers the mission briefing, Captain Kirk's grin as he described their hosts with, "a little weird, but weird's part of the job." 'Weird' is probably not the right word either. _Unusual, as we must to you._

_I find you interesting, in your layered structure, so different from us and our world's lifeforms._ The Mathematician sends an image with the statement, of a generalized humanoid with its different systems highlighted, bone underlying muscles, nerves and skin. Pavel nods his head, thinking wordless agreement in return.

Then the Mathematician sends him an equation -- basic astrogation, the symbols have different shapes but their arrangement is unmistakable. Pavel hears himself gasp in pleased surprise, and brokenly circular ripples propagate across the Mathematician's surfaces. _You are a fellow quantifier, your shipmates said._

Pavel looks up at that, glancing around the open-celinged round chamber. His shipmates have left, probably to be shown the rest of the structure by the other Jellyfish People -- perhaps 'Jellyfish People' is not such a polite term, he wonders with belated alarm. _No offense meant,_ he thinks distinctly, and the answering pulse of amusement is so strong it makes him giggle.

The transfer of emotion startles Pavel into a moment of wariness. He should be careful not to give away classified information. "Yes, I am Ship's Navigator," he replies, organizing his thoughts by speaking aloud. "I am mathematician like you."

_No wonder we converse so well_, comes the reply. _Mathematics is the universal language._

"Mr. Scott would agree!" Pavel answers a pulse of curiosity with a mental image of the Chief Engineer in full motion, and feels a caress along his forearm. He looks down to see a third tentacle, this one glowing flesh-pink and the width of his thumb, trailing over his sleeve the way a convivial humanoid might touch another as they lean in closer. "He tells me, ah --" the tentacle winds loosely around his arm; Pavel closes his eyes and it's like a gentle hand grip, not even disconcerting if he doesn't look down. "I think he should enjoy conversation with you."

_I enjoy conversation with you._ But that statement is followed by a pulse of irritation that feels like an annoyed frown. _I should enjoy it better if I could better hear your thoughts. Come, rest on the rim of my bowl, proximity will help._

"All right." Pavel takes the last two steps and sits carefully, making sure he doesn't settle on any of the gently writhing tentacles that make up the Mathematician's body. The bowl's edge is dark, smooth, firm but yielding, and Pavel sets one hand on the material.

Then his hand rises as the pink tentacle constricts firmly around his arm. Pavel reaches to pry at it, the Mathematician surges over him in a multicolored cascade of tentacles, and hand-to-hand isn't much use against a non-humanoid. Pavel's phaser and communicator clatter to the ground as the Mathematician drags him bodily into the bowl, splaying him face-up atop itself; he draws breath to shout, and a soft, rubbery pad seals his mouth securely, muffling his 'mmphs!' to faintness.

_What is this?_ he thinks as loudly as he can, tugging at his living bonds, restrained by their smooth muscular pull. _Why have you attacked me?_The Mathematician sends him an incongruous pulse of happiness as more tentacles twine across Pavel's palms, stroke his face and throat, spiral into his trouser legs over his skin. _My shipmates will return and take action against you,_ he thinks desperately, but in the back of his mind he wonders, _Where did the mathematics go?_

_The mathematics are still here with us_, the Mathematician says, its calm pleasant voice unchanged. _And everyone else is far away. You enjoy mathematics, do you not? Let me share them with you as you share your emotions with me._

Curiosity flickers through the alarm, and there _were_ those vids he's seen, but... _Put me down, please!_ Pavel can only see the sky, far and greenish-blue above him, as he's lowered onto the pile of rippling tentacles, his arms and legs gently but inescapably pulled wide. _This is not appropriate!_ he insists to himself and the Mathematician both.

_Why is it not?_ Tentacles twine under his uniform, stroking more and more of his skin like dry tongues, like he's being tasted. _It is another form of conversation, is it not?_

The Mathematician radiates avid hunger, and Pavel sharply realizes he really is being tasted. He struggles even harder, just as uselessly, his muscles taut with strain, and another tentacle-tip slides over his forehead, pressing his head back, its point resting between his eyes. _Do not consume me! I am needed! I would rather not die!_

_Silly skeletal lifeform._ The Mathematician sounds like it would laugh. _I have no wish to harm you, let alone consume you. Your lovely mind shall continue existing. I wish to converse with you. Your thoughts, what you feel, I desire to share in them._

Pavel's boots pop off his feet, his trousers starting to rip from the ankles upwards. _At least spare my uniform,_ he begs in thought, a mortifying image flashing through his mind of rematerializing naked in the transporter room.

The emotion sent to him now is puzzlement; Pavel has a brief memory of Hikaru frowning slightly, crinkles forming between his eyes. _I do not understand body coverings,_ says the Mathematician. _I will remove it to sense you more fully._

_That is not necessary--_ The tentacle over his mouth pushes in, round and heavy, faintly tangy on his tongue, its surface skin-dense and resilient under his panicked bite, and Pavel's thought trips and halts.

_Show me how you would have your covering removed, or I will use my method._ One trouser leg rips to the knee. _Yours is surely more elegant._

_This is not fair,_ Pavel thinks resentfully, but he imagines taking his uniform off, undoing the fastenings, drawing the garments over his head and down his legs, and tentacles flutter over his skin following his thoughts, stripping him naked. The day is temperately warm, but he can feel himself blushing all over under the writhing mop of sleek boneless tentacles, the light breeze cool on his bare hot skin. Hopefully he thinks of the tentacles unwinding, but they squeeze tighter, like passionate fingers all over his body, as the Mathematician sends a wilder pulse of amusement, strong enough to make him giddy.

Pavel wants to giggle, to scream, to escape. His head spins with the touches and caresses and squeezes all over his body, the thoughts poured into his mind; his heart pounds wildly and his lungs work against the thick tentacle wound around his torso like a constricting snake. The one in his mouth swells further, approximating the dimensions of a human cock and seemingly the heat as well, and his face burns as he shoves away another thought of Hikaru. The rest wrap around his throat, his fingers, his thighs, his cock, rippling and stroking and sucking at his skin.

_Delicious,_ the Mathematician tells him. _Tasty, tasty humanoid. Your species is the best so far._

_I thought your leaders said we were your first visitors!_ Pavel has no galactic idea why he's worrying about that when pulsating tentacles are pressing down his tongue and twining around his cock and a thin one is insinuating itself between his lower cheeks, but it is an inconsistency.

_We tell all visitors so,_ says the Mathematician blithely, quivering beneath him as a person does when biting into a delicacy. _Your pleasure on hearing it is perennially delightful._

And as it pushes into him, filling and stroking him just this side of too much, the Mathematician sends him a foursquare matrix in four directions, a tesseract of tensors. _What is this?_ Pavel doesn't know if he's asking about the tentacle swelling inside him or the novel math inserted into his buzzing head.

_A simplified description of a time-linked singularity_ the Mathematician says, its tones soothing, coaxing. _Is it not beautiful? You taste beautiful. Give me more of your pleasure._

The matrix _is_ beautiful, the interwoven edges of a gap in the universe. Sensations whisper all over Pavel's skin, crackling up his spine, and this is unexpected and unasked for but he is moaning, twisting within the tentacles, his body responding to being stroked and licked inside and out. Feathery touches trail between his thighs and over his collarbones, his lips buzz with strain, and all he can see is the math pushed into his head.

His thoughts whirling, Pavel can feel the Mathematician riffle through them like fingers through hair, parting and retwining them, the sheer physical pleasure, the mathematical wonder, the surprise and embarrassment and confusion. He wants to resent this, he _does_, but it's new and unexpected and he will come if it keeps up, heat twisting in his belly, crackles of fire encroaching on his mind.

Then the tentacle inside him presses on his prostate, and it's like a laser beam of pleasure searing through him, burning a hole in his thoughts. The Mathematician vibrates, sending him a wave of delight and the equations that spiral along the arms of galaxies as it presses again, and again, until Pavel's vision flares white and black and impossible colors as he comes spasming, surrounding and surrounded by ceaseless writhing.

He hangs panting in the Mathematician's ever-shifting hold, as it fills his head with a fuzzy tuneless hum. _Dynamics,_ it tells him. _I should have guessed you would enjoy dynamics._ Flattened tentacle-tips lick his skin dry.

Pavel coughs around the tentacle on his tongue, feeling blood-hot marks rising all over his skin, and pushes his lassitude to the forefront of his mind. _I am done,_ he thinks, at the Mathematician, at himself, _really, thank you, but no more._

_I can feel you cell by vibrant cell,_ the Mathematician responds. _There is more in you, I know it. I have not even shown you the fractal definitions of your own structure._

Pavel can't grit his teeth, and his fists barely close around throbbing tentacles, but he envisions the motions as he summons up his last reserve of determination. _I have asked you and asked again that you let me go. I appreciate what you offer to show me, but --_

The Mathematician sends, on a wave of fond smugness, an image of Pavel as it sees him now, dangling prone, face-up, twisting his arms and arching his spine in its hundredfold grasp. He doesn't have enough time to be mortified before it shows him what it sees beneath his skin, mapping nerves with electrical impulses, tracing his exotic circulatory system with curious interest. Superimposed on his physical structure are numbers, denoting dimensions, quantities, densities; a deceptively simple equation seems to float before him, just a few lines long.

Pavel can tell he's being distracted and persuaded. He shuts his eyes though he can't close his mind, though coils slide soft and firm over his skin, and tries his best not to be curious about how the Mathematician produced such an equation.

_It is not perfect,_ the Mathematician tells him, as if making a concession. _See where it fails to match your form in details?_ Tentacles flick and press at the points where numbers are missing or incorrect, coincidentally spots such as Pavel's nipples and navel and the small of his back, the edges of his mouth and the nape of his neck.

Tickled by a hundred fingers, still tingling from his orgasm, Pavel gasps and writhes as his blood surges faster. _I know little about fractals_ is possibly the strangest thought to have as the tentacle within him pulses and moves, rubbing so his whole body shudders. It feels like his body and mind are of one piece, suspended and receptive, drowning in information yet open to more.

_True, you are a navigator._ Tentacles stroke his closed eyes, his cheeks, the pulse in his throat, as the Mathematician shows Pavel a theoretical cluster of a hundred thousand stars and their overlapping web of orbits. He can almost grasp the pattern governing the changing routes through the maze.

It's as encompassing a vision as the relentless stroking is a sensation. Sparkles burst behind Pavel's closed eyelids, electricity streams beneath his skin, and his thoughts shatter into confused wonder as the dance of stars grows transparent in the instant that he starts to come again. The Mathematician hums into him, louder with each fragmented pulse, and now the hum expands into the physical, vibrating through every square millimeter of tentacle-to-skin contact, a rich overwhelming buzz.

_Stop, stop_ and _more, more_ Pavel begs simultaneously, his skin damp and sizzling, his nerves flaring like overloaded circuits, theorems he's never learned exploding before his wide-open eyes. _I can't, I'll die, I want..._ He's still hard, so hard he aches, throbbing within a rippling spiral of tentacles, more flickering over his balls. Living cords twist around his nipples and toes and the sky is a color beyond the spectrum. He feels like he'll burn up if this doesn't stop, like he'll explode if it does.

The Mathematician sends a little puff of disbelief and a vast wave of delight, so much that it washes through Pavel, sweeping up the conflicting, overwhelming sensations into one titanic summation. He can't tell anymore where his mind ends and reality begins, just that the universe is pulsating around him, or perhaps only his body, as he orgasms once more in shudders upon shudders until he thinks he'll disintegrate in a shower of quarks and tachyons.

_Splendid beyond all anticipation,_ the Mathematician tells him eagerly. _You saw the Infinite for that moment, did you not?_ Pavel dangles, sobbing and dizzy, back arched and limbs akimbo, twitching with aftershocks around the tentacle thrumming inside him. _I saw it through you. Once more and together we might inscribe it in equations._ Pavel moans weakly around the tentacle still in his mouth, his throat raw with screams he doesn't remember, unable to know if he's agreeing or protesting.

Then the Mathematician says, _That hurts_, accompanied by a sharp thwack below Pavel. Above him he hears "Let him go," in Hikaru's low serious voice, and his weary heart thumps triple-time.

_Stop that,_ the Mathematician thinks on a small wave of pain it merely makes Pavel aware of instead of sharing. _It will take days to regenerate my structure._

"I can chop you up so it takes years," Hikaru snarls. A sibilant whistling noise and Pavel's right arm tumbles down, fragments of tentacles spasming and uncoiling around it. The Mathematician throbs with displeasure. "Let him _go_."

Pavel is rolled over amidst the Mathematician's tentacles as they narrow and slip from his body, as it lowers him onto his feet beside its bowl. His shivering legs won't hold him, but Hikaru catches him around the waist as he buckles, pressing the other fist, katana and all, to his cheek, both hands bracingly firm. "Pavel," Hikaru says urgently, "Chekov, come on, please, be okay."

Even without any contact Pavel can feel the Mathematician sulking behind him, but he has no energy left to process the implications. His eyes hurt and won't focus properly when he eases them open, but he manages to look into Hikaru's wide worried eyes and push his sore mouth into a smile. He means to say something, to thank Hikaru or reassure him, but Hikaru's face blurs into gray, into black.

As Pavel loses consciousness, he hears in his mind the Mathematician say _I suppose this is goodbye._

************************

 

"Need anything?" Hikaru asks for the ninth time, looking at his hands folded in his lap as he sits beside Pavel's bed in Sickbay. Lying on his side, Pavel would rather look at Hikaru than the privacy curtains, or the ceiling, or most things, so he props his head on his arm and also watches Hikaru's hands; they start out gracefully folded together, then twist around each other finger by finger, eventually pull apart and renew the fold.

Pavel has lost count of how many times Hikaru's hands have repeated this cycle -- he might have been fidgeting like this the whole time he waited while Dr. McCoy fixed Pavel up a little and fussed over him a lot. He's spent the entire visit now folding and refolding his hands while looking at them or the boring curtains instead of at Pavel, and he goes back on shift in less than ten minutes. Suddenly fed up, Pavel reaches down and pushes his hand between Hikaru's. "I need you not to treat me like a thing broken."

Hikaru's hands refold, this time around Pavel's. "Okay, sorry, I just --" Finally he looks up, and Pavel remembers remembering that crease between his eyes, but he's not fidgeting or glancing away anymore. "Pavel, I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

"I am okay." It does help to have Hikaru's hands around his, steady and anchoring. "A bit squeezed, but okay."

Hikaru snorts. "Squeezed," he echoes incredulously. "Um. The Jellyfish People's planetary council sends their deepest apologies, by the way. For whatever the hell that's worth. There's a copy in your messages."

"Thank you." A wisp of hair has fallen over Hikaru's furrowed forehead, and Pavel reaches to push it up. "For that, and for rescuing me."

Hikaru's forehead creases more under Pavel's hand. "I owe you an _apology_! I shouldn't've left you--"

Pavel huffs. "Stop it. I can care for myself." Hikaru does Pavel the kindness of shutting his mouth tightly, but his eyes narrow with doubt that Pavel does deserve. "Or I should," he admits. "I was naive this time, I think."

"Don't you dare." Hikaru's eyes glint, narrowing further. "A manipulative telepathic alien could pull something like this on any of us." Pavel squeezes Hikaru's hand, and he stops and shakes his head, taking a deep breath. "Anyway. You're okay, right?"

Pavel doesn't point out that Hikaru just asked that question. "Yes, yes." Instead he tries to come up with a better reply. "It was... not so bad." Hikaru looks extremely dubious and considerably annoyed, and Pavel thinks harder, organizing his answer for both of them. "Very weird. Educational, I was given some mathematics I should write up. I am trying to think of it as a cultural exchange." Hikaru snorts, his frown easing. "But mostly... mostly very weird, but that is part of the job."

Hikaru smiles wryly. "Well, that makes sense, I guess. Weird with math added. And hey, if you ever..." He pauses, thumb stroking the back of Pavel's hand, and continues more firmly. "When you make this into a funny story, no one's going to be able to top it."

"The Captain may," Pavel says, watching Hikaru's eyes shut tightly as he laughs. Eyes still closed, Hikaru leans over Pavel, and his hand on Pavel's face reminds him of its reassuring feel, clamped around the katana hilt, when Hikaru came for him.

Hikaru's kiss reminds Pavel of all the ones before, and all the ones yet to come. "I'll be back after shift," he says, standing straight, their hands squeezing mutually before letting go.

"I will be in quarters then," Pavel says hopefully, and Hikaru's laugh is hearteningly light.

"That's what _you_ think. I bet Dr. McCoy keeps you here another night." Hikaru steps back towards the curtain, but the laughter fades from his face. "But you'll be okay." Pavel can hear Hikaru's voice tilt up, the question emerging.

He smiles in answer. "Hikaru," he says, "I am fine. Or I will be."


End file.
